‘Feeling Tremendously Full of Running’: Happy Diamond Anniversary to the Four-Minute Mile

By Tim Cavanaugh —
May 6, 2014

On this day 60 years ago, medical student Roger Bannister put the myth of the unbreakable four-minute mile into the dustbin of history with the sound barrier and the Earth’s 1 billion–population “carrying capacity.” Watch as the fleet-footed Englishman makes history, and narrates his own story in an impeccable Oxford accent:

Six decades later, around a thousand men have broken the four-minute mile; and the record, held by the great Hicham El Guerrouj, now stands at three minutes, forty-three seconds. But the one-miler remains among the most grueling of track events. Too long to be a sprint, too short for anything but flat-out mad-dogging, it’s a race that still separates the men from the boys. (Or at least separates the men from the women; the world is still waiting for the first woman to break four minutes.)